Inspiration
COVID-19 has changed my life, and I've lost a lot of friends due to the pandemic. I wanted to use technology to build something that could help prevent the spread of this disastrous disease. I've also noticed that because of the vaccine, a lot of people have stopped wearing face masks. While the vaccine is helpful, it is not 100% effective. More importantly, it is important to be courteous of others with compromised immune systems, especially in high-volume areas.
What it does
The drone flies up and detects whether or not a person is wearing a face mask. If the person is wearing a face mask, it will do a flip and send an alert.
How I built it
I built this project with a DJI Tello drone and programmed it via Python. I used the Tello SDK to program the drone movements and integrated this with OpenCV for the face mask detection
Challenges I ran into
The OpenCV aspect of this project was difficult. I do not have that much experience with OpenCV, so I had to do a lot of learning on the side. Also, the Tello drone uses an ad hoc network to communicate with the Python scripts, so I did not have full internet capabilities. If I had full internet capabilities, I could have incorporated an app with the drone, where every time the drone detects/does not detect if a person was wearing a face mask, it could detail that data to a mobile app.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I am proud of the presentation I compiled for this project. I believe that this project has a lot of future uses, especially now during the pandemic. I detail all this information in my presentation, which can be viewed here: DroneMask Presentation
What I learned
I learned how to program a drone and incorporate OpenCV into Python scripts. I also learned that getting even a simple project like this to work can take a long time!
What's next for DroneMask
I would like to expand DroneMask so that when the drone flies up and detects if someone in a crowd is not wearing a face mask, then it will fly to that person and drop a face mask accurately to the individual.
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